This is the first blog post in what my friends and I hope will be an active hub of information, conversation, and organizing about protecting civil rights and civil liberties where we live — Montgomery County, Maryland.

This model legislation offers local legislative bodies an opportunity to restore civil rights and ensure the focus of local law enforcement agencies on their core public safety mission by limiting their participation in federal immigration enforcement and domestic surveillance activities. These limits effectively help restore longstanding civil rights recently eroded by the wars on drugs, immigrants, and terror.
The legislation’s sections include the following:

A prohibition on profiling according to race, religion, country of origin, or gender;

For my part, I think those efforts and our own will mean as much as any ordinance we see enacted here in Montgomery County. By standing up against profiling, against unwarranted surveillance, data mining and infiltration, we’re saying no, it’s not all right that these things are happening — and no, we don’t think there’s nothing we can do about it. Yes, we care about our civil rights and civil liberties. Yes, we can protect them.